March 2014

March 27, 2014

Well, actually this is about what I want to see Destiny do in its open world. I want it to approach the compelling narrative of Red Dead Redemption and Fallout 3. I think that asking for Elder Scrolls levels is not going to come until Destiny 2, at which point the depth of the legendary backstories will have soaked in, as well as with fan fiction and hopefully a good book by Greg Bear.

I know Bungie don't like to hear 'RPG' but as beautiful as the environments are so far, if Destiny doesn't get a lot of open world missions going, then I will be disappointed. That is to say that if it's strictly Halo-like in terms of the pursuit of enemies leading you around the map, then it won't work as well as I think it should.

So here's what I'm thinking, in short spurts.

A. Task AreasSome kind of areas should be 'task' areas. That is to say you should be able to travel to a place in the open world and hang out there doing a number of tasks and returning to that same place. I think of the big farm way up the hill in Red Dead Redemption. Catch a runaway horse. Stop a barn fire. Tame a mustang. In Destiny task areas could be similar with the occasional alien enemy making a pest out of themselves.

In Old Russia, one could be tasked to find 5 car tires or mechanical doohickies from that stream of abandoned wrecks. Or maybe you need to find spare parts for your own ship in the Cosmodrome. Wow, now that I think of that, I can't see how that would not be a simple first mission depending upon how much of a chickenchaser they make your newb Guardian.

I can imagine you finding some old derelict Awoken codger out in the airplane graveyard cooking a greasy piece of meat in the fuselage of an old A380. Which now that I think of it, what other kinds of creatures does earth have besides birds? What do the Fallen eat? Maybe they eat horses and we have a horse escort mission. Meh, I hated driving cattle in Red Dead, but horse roping from a Shrike might be cool.

B. Traditional DungeonsOther areas should be like traditional 'dungeons', where you go into creepy surroundings in order to retrieve some strange artifact. In these, everything is what you would expect and I'm rather taken by the rules of engagment set by Skyrim and Fallout 3. The first time through the dungeon, if it is visible and accessible to you, presents a challenge as part of a narrative and it it leveled up to your skillset. Upon subsequent passed through there should be a modicum of sameness, but the challenge should be of a different shape after a set number of visits.

I'm thinking in particular of my favorite dungeon in Skyrim that was guarded by two daedric princes - you know those devil looking guys. There was always lots of gold and some high quality weapons there, and if you could beat the two daedra, then you were set. It would have been nice if on the third try the game threw in a completely different set of enemies and loot to throw me off balance.

C. Wandering PrizesI think it would be cool for you to be aware of some kind of loot or achievement that doesn't exist in one place for long. Or maybe it's like soap, if you don't grab it successfully, it squirts out of your hand to a new location, except in Destiny that location might be through a transport portal. I like the idea of perhaps one of those scary little girls who appear out of nowhere and tell you to follow them and it ends up being something really trippy. "How did you get that cape?" "From the girl in the pink tutu on Venus, near the laboratory".

A completely different way to think of WW2, not that I haven't revised my understanding several times over several years. In this telling, I sense the madness of Hitler to a greater extent than before in that he escalated his perfidy conveniently pursuant to his own failures. Hitler played brinksmanship beyond the extremes of reason and passion. Stalin, on the other hand seems to be have a kind of arrogance of inevitability to his calculations of starving the masses, which he moderated only to the extent (as did Hitler) that he required slaves to achieve his ends. The striking fact that both Hitler and Stalin were trying to achieve a land-based empire to rival the US is a parallel I'd never heard expressed before. Nor was I aware of the extent to which the destruction of Poland as an intellectual capitol was necessary to the achievement of that goal for both Germany and the Soviets. It is bracing to discover how much Stalin feared the wrath of the Japanese and what China's sitting out implies.

Most of all, however, Bloodlands brings home the scale of murder in between what we've all been exposed to. It is neither the pitiful tale of a family destroyed by military units or the mind boggling scale of 'millions' gassed, starved, tortured and shot. It is the village by village, train car by train car, ditch by bloody ditch account of 237 shot per day diaries, replicated all over for weeks and months on end.

March 14, 2014

Do you have, or have you had, a large book, record, or movie (DVD/VHS) collection? How has it changed as everything's gone digital? Advantages/disadvantages?

Yes. It has changed quite a lot. Admittedly I'm on something of a cutting edge, being an IT professional, the advantage is that I've gone through several iterations of the business of what we in the business call 'lift and shift'.

MusicI currently possess about 25 thousand songs on close to 4000 albums in digital format. Now this is actually small relative to many folks I've met in the recording industry. It's relatively large for laypeople and only just now accomodatable for easy, secure digital use, by which I mean streaming my own music from the cloud.

I started collecting music as a DJ in 1979 and had about five milkcrates of vinyl, most of which were albums but about a crate and a half were 12 inch singles. I still have many of my old favorites like Reach For It by George Duke, and IQ6 Zang Tumb Tuum Sampler but I've replaced all of my actual favorite songs from those. I started buying CDs in the mid 80s when they first became available. I can still recall the days when you couldn't get reggae music on CD. I got up to about 800 or so and then stopped counting.

About 10 years ago I ripped all of my CDs to disk and then started selling them to Ameoba and gave several hundred to my sister. Right now I have about 500 in the house and about two milkcrates full in the garage. Now here's the odd thing. I've been buying external hard drives pretty much every year because they always fail. They were getting to fail on the regular so I had to come up with a strategy. The first strategy was to duplicate my music on multiple drives. Before cloud backup systems became widely available at reasonable prices (about 4 or 5 years ago), the safest thing to do was manual JBOD replication. I've spent $600 for a home RAID system and it blew up too. So I realized that I had to re-buy some more of my must have CDs when I couldn't recover from disk, just in case.

Then that created a new problem. Now I have 6 versions of my favorite songs. Which one did I rip at a high bit rate? Which one did I get from a friend? What song is 'Track 01'? BTW Gracenote is one of the great innovations of America. Who says metadata isn't important? So I had to invest in a deduplication software program, and once again when I switched over to Mac once and for all.

When Steve Jobs finally announced iCloud and its replication service, that was the beginning of the end. I migrated all of my deduplicated music, finally onto a single massive disk drive and let Apple do the rest. But I'm constantly pruning and clipping and gardening my music metadata, because neither Shazam, iCloud, Soundhound, MusicBrainz nor Amazon can remember all the details perfectly. Not to mention how reissues make identification even more fuzzy. Chances are that if you didn't buy the original CD or vinyl you cannot know that the metadata are correct. Even so, iCloud was good enough.

However, I knew that Google and Amazon would be getting into the business shortly. In fact, I have always purchased MP3s from Amazon and played them in iTunes once all that DRM nonsense was worked out. But no longer. While I still have all of my 500+ CDs and 25,000 songs on hard drives, I only listen to streamed music from the Amazon Music Player. I can upload unlimited amounts of new music, which I almost never do because I buy it all from Amazon. I still have an (old) CD burner in my (old) MacBookPro for MP3 disks I burn for use in my truck, but everything else is streaming digits.

I should say that music quality matters a great deal to me, but I cannot afford to be the kind of audiophile I'd like to be. So while I have a very nice set of powered studio monitors and subwoofer in my living room, my ears have dumbed down to the standard of digital fidelity.

MoviesUnlike music, most movies I like are generally unrepeatable. Once you know Keyser Soze, it's over. Furthermore I can multitask quite well with music, in fact some improves the quality of my work, but movies require focused attention. For me, movies are all about the visual experience, so I still go out to see first run special effects blockbusters. Some of them I don't mind seeing again once or twice, and of course there are a few delights from which I never tire. One of these happens to be The Fifth Element. Yeah. Action and spectacle. But I also like short films and I have collected almost all of the Pixar shorts. I miss the Spike & Mike film festivals and all of that in general and have lowered my expectations for film boosting that for literature and video games.

I 'own' streamable copies of just a dozen or so films and I possess about 120 titles on DVD. I haven't bothered with BluRay at all. I own a subscription to Netflix and have had it and Tivo since the very beginning. I used to rip Netflix disks onto my hard drive but they were susceptible to the same hardware failures as my music. Plus, even as I traveled with a very small portable hard-drive on my laptop, it finally wasn't worth it to watch my own in-flight movies. Reading was just better. All of my VHS was Disney crap for the kidlings, but they've outgrown them and we garage-sold them all. I cannot imagine that I will purchase any more than a dozen hard copy movies for the rest of my life. If I'm not in (cheap or free) streaming range, I won't ask for video.

I should make note of the point that I consume video vastly differently than I used to. That is to say I watch almost no 'primetime'. I will watch the extraordinary live sports event, Tour de France, Olympics, Super Bowl, World Cup, NCAA Title Game, but other than that, everything goes to the DVR. Even for massive hit series (of which there have only been about 7 or 8 worth my while since the debut of 24) I tend to wait for the critical success to happen and then watch a couple seasons's worth in retrospect. In fact, my taste in video tends towards that serial mode. I consumed all but the last season of Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones that way. The only thing I watch daily are my YouTube subscriptions.

I've never been much of a TV person since I moved away from home. I bought my first black & white 12 incher after my 30th birthday and vowed never to have one in my living room - a vow I kept until.. oh wait, the kids. When I was single I only watched Seinfeld and David Letterman to understand what people were talking about at work. Other than that it was strictly News Hour and Charlie Rose. That would be from 1982 until 1997. So basically after the end of Hill Street Blues until the Teletubbies, I'm a blank.

BooksMy father has one of the most impressive collections of black literature of the 60s that exists. I grew up building bookshelves. I still tend to be the kind of book snob who denigrates people who don't have big shelves in their living rooms, and I will check the titles I see and make character judgments. But I have definitely changed all that and only a fraction of my books are shelved in the house. I keep a small technical libary in my office about 50 books and a smattering of others. There are 100 in my big ornamental shelf downstairs and another 100 strewn throughout other nooks and crannies. There are probably another 200-300 in the garage.

I bought the Kindle within a few months of its entry into the market. According to Amazon, I have 401 books in that library. Additionally, as a subscriber to Audible, I have amassed about 120 volumes. I read about 2 or 3 books per month which is about a third of my reading. Mostly I'm online reading the hundred or so blogs and sources in my RSS. So a huge amount of my reading has shifted from books and notes taken at seminars, to online.

About a fifth of the books that I get from Audible are reference books, history mostly. And for those I find most appealing, I will also purchase the Kindle version. I often want to cite something from those books I find compelling and I enjoy swapping back from reading to listening. That said, I get most of my listening done when I drive long distances or at night before bed.

When I buy actual books, they are mostly technical texts and older rare books I remember from childhood. I just bought a farmer's encyclopedia published in 1892. Very cool. I wish there were more books in digital form. I actually don't like the prospect of inheriting that large physical library. Books are meant to be digested, not shown off, and it's always about what you're learning now isn't it? Attachment to the printed page is sentimental, a worthy sentiment to be sure, but they take up a lot of space.

March 10, 2014

Any testiment that begins with the words 'As a black man, I..' is one that should raise eyebrows of skepticism. That is not because there is something wrong with the tribes invoked, but because what follows is inevitably trying to represent something that may or may not exist. I'm not saying that blackness doesn't exist, rather I'm saying that perhaps it only exists in the confession. In other words, the only thing that is universally true about blackness is that it begins with voluntary negrosis, the conscious act of making oneself darker than they are - an action of conformity, of taking a particular fork in the road of identity, a racial construction in progress.

I understand that there is no black American cultural orthodoxy because that racial construction is always in process, often at the Peasant level. (c.f. 'ratchet'). There are recognizable forms. In music, there is R&B, Gospel, Blues, Jazz and Hiphop. Within those forms there are better and worse examples, and of course the influence of these cultural inventions is wide and deep. A lot of people get wrapped around various axels of authenticity but no one dares say "Miles Davis IS Jazz". What Mahalia Jackson sung may be the best example of Gospel, but nobody gets to say that all gospel singers since her are lesser shades of black.

This all comes to mind in the context of the complaints of a number of black American college students managing the microaggressions that have come to give rise to their profiles in recent weeks. Today, the Kwaku network produced "I Too Am Harvard", with its hard bitten confessions. Not long before that, UCLA Law students pleaded their discomforts and receive this kind of response from the sympathetic.

There is, of course, some intellectual tradition in all of this that is not vapid or silly. That's because the tradition is written as literature. It would have been nice to see some mugshots with a bit more creativity, though I certainly wonder if the dude in the Alpha jersey isn't mocking himself all hoodified. Be that as it may, one hopes that the literary tradition can indeed survive Tumbler and YouTube as it takes its hits today by kids who think they represent.

So I decided to shoot an AR-15. Better sooner than later. I watched a video of a convincing argument by Colion Noir about why he should have an assault rifle or a semi-automatic rifle, and I've been trying to figure out the difference between .223 and 5.56. A combination of circumstances that found me at my local range renting an AR.

I brought my own pistol and rented the AR. The dude gave me basic instructions but there were a couple of weird things. He said only put in 8 rounds (although the magazine holds 10) so it won't jam, and if it does then somebody will come out to the firing line and help me. But the really weird thing was that he used the cap of a Bic pen to stick in a little hole which had previously been some machined part, in order to release the magazine.

I went to the firing line and took my time, loading up my pistol mags. Then I broke open the box of 20 5.56 rounds that I purchased from the counter and pushed 8 of them into the rifle magazine. I had that same feeling, literally of 'cheap skates' that you get when you rent ice skates at the rink. These ain't the sharpest tools in the shed. I shot the two mags from my pistol, felt good about it and then picked up the rifle.

Slammed the mag in, pulled back the bolt and looked down the iron sights 10 yards to my zombie target, slowly squeeze and boom. Hmm. A bit more kick than I expected, but completely reasonable. The plastic stock wasn't very comfortable but not awkward. I was low and left, but left a neat hole. I shot four more booms and then click. What? So I executed from my training, tap, rack, squeeze. Another click. I tried to put the gun on safety and it wouldn't go. Then I pulled out the magazine, completely forgetting the Bic pen cap. It came right out. There was no cartridge in the chamber. Failure to feed.

So I slammed it in again, racked the bolt. Click. WTF. I haven't even gotten through one magazine and this piece of crap is already malfunctioning. I removed the magazine (again without the pen cap) and walked over to W. A new friend that I met just that day, W was geared out in a chav suit with a XXL jersey with Run DMC -style fonts. His cap was turned backwards and he wore a single black shooting glove. W had a whole arsenal of pistols in his stall, one of which looked very much like a Desert Eagle, only blacked out. There must have been 8 guns. I didn't watch him shoot, but every thing about him smelled very Wu Tang Clan. W's not somebody to fuck with. I asked him to come over and take a look at my AR. He went through a couple well-practiced motions and remarked that the gun was dry as a bone. No lube. Hmm. Then he handed it back to me. I aimed and got a boom. And then another click. I handed him the pen cap and he nodded thoughtfully, rolled his eyes and uttered two words.

"California shit".

He used the pen cap, replaced the magazine and handed me the gun. I got the last two booms out of it and then realized what he was on about. My rented gun was in the twilight zone between manufacture and legal compliance. In other words it had been crippled in order to make do. Obviously, the normal magazine locking and release mechanism had been altered, so that's why the pen cap was used. My guess was that this was a non-standard magazine, shortened to handle only 10 cartridges at a time, which is the California limit. I hadn't realized that the magazine wasn't locking properly into place - the fit was less than perfect, and less than perfect on a machine such as an AR-15 is sufficiently dangerous to piss me off. A lot.

In normal life, especially when talking about human effort, perfect is the enemy of good. In engineering, good is the enemy of perfect. When it comes to engineering firearms, perfect is the only thing that's acceptable. I've been overthinking firearms for over a year now, and have had the good fortune to have serious, smart men and women as my shooting buddies. Even now as I improve my shooting skills and expand my knowledge, I am coming to understanding the logic behind the sentiments of the shooting public. Only experts have, or should have, the patience for guns that fail for various reasons. When our gang goes shooting and a gun misbehaves, there's immediately a set of troubleshooting procedures and discussions that go into effect, most of it over my head, but all of it comprehensible if you are a mechanical engineer.

I have put about 1000 rounds through my new Sig pistol, and oiled it for the first time over the weekend. It has never failed. This AR-15 failed within 5 shots. That's unacceptable.

Last month or so, I entered the debate surrounding microstamping. I understood quite clearly why shooters would be opposed to some mechanism that changes the trigger system in order to stamp a code onto the brass so that 'criminals could be identified'. You have only to shoot a semi-auto once to recognize that hot brass pops out onto the ground when you shoot. Any 7 year old knows you should pick up your trash and recycle it, but somehow we are to believe that crooks are too stupid to pick up their brass, right? The trigger mechanism, especially in handguns, is one of the most sensitive and determining aspects of their quality. More than anything else, the difference between a good gun and a bad one is the trigger. Microstamping tech is a monkey wrench, which means, to the delight of legislators with a view to suppress the sales of guns in this state, that guns would have to be redesigned. Those that don't, if such a requirement were to pass into law, would be prohibited. There's no gun grabbing going on in California, all the would-be gun grabbers are attacking the supply side.

Despite Peruta, such protectionists have ample precedent to be hopeful in the auto industry. California standards are different and more stringent for auto emissions than those in other states. We all can remember when catalytic converters in exhaust systems were new (and troublesome), and we can all remember how poorly engineered were the cars of the 80s. Today, cars are over-engineered and have few if any user servicable parts inside. Few people change plugs or use timing lights. Some of that engineering is perfect. But guns aren't cars, and over-engineering bullets and their firing mechanisms is not a good idea. Keeping it simple is the best, and the most elegant design when it comes to firearms are the simplest. Reliability is the most important engineering goal, if I may state the obvious, when it comes to dealing with explosives.

So now I have the real experience of dealing with a faulty firearm. And I tell you I was still angry about it after I left the range. I have always been drawn to the precision of working these machines. That's my gearhead sensibility. I just can't stand the idea of explosives designed by political committees. I don't think any reasonable person would.

BTW. It should come to you as no surprise that I think there are few things a foolish as firearms manufactured by 3D printers. This ain't Star Trek.

March 09, 2014

I recently stumbled upon the website of the Catholic school I attended for the 7th and 8th grade. It looks very good. So I have considered going there to make a speech. And so I started making a speech, starting with combatting the presumptions I wish to avoid about being a 'black role model'. I'm fairly confident that I can do that, and several years ago I pretty much figured out what's important in my life such that I'd make a fairly similar speech no matter who was in the audience of kids, racially speaking. But that's kind of marginally interesting; what's more interesting is how I'm living now and if and why that matters.

So this.

I'm thinking it's particularly interesting to consider how I'm living principly because I'm a father of three who works at home doing cloud stuff. At first blush, that doesn't seem like saying much until you add all the pieces together. I do that periodically as an old habit; I play 'time travel' and introduce my younger self to my current self in the future. So some of this game about what you would tell young people is easy, what message would you want to hear about the future? Most of the time, it comes down to how living in the (present) future is similar and different from what you (and everybody) expected. It starts with history.

The fact that Barack Obama is the 43rd President is an easy thing to talk about, but what's surprising is that he was neither Ron Brown nor Colin Powell. Those were the leaders of the conventional wisdom from my POV. But even more surprising is the lack of enthusiasm, and even negative empathy among the mixed feelings I have for him. Which immediately brings up the fact that I am a Stoic aiming for my Martial Education and the implications of my prior Republicanisms, my organicisms and my dropping the privileges of the Talented Tenth into which I was born and raised. There's an interesting personal history of my own existential development the most notable I think is the extent to which I have a studied immunity to multicultural appeals and imperatives. That's interesting because it goes to the heart of why I don't want to be a black role model and the implications for who anyone should be at all.

That I have attained the kind of life that reckons with such questions of humanity speaks to my intelligence which I have begun to recognize that I have somewhat underestimated. That sounds weird but let me put this another way. According to something I believe which I recently read, my IQ which has consistently tested between 130 and 136 puts me in the class of 'gifted'. I always wanted to be a 'genius' but that requires 150, I forget what they call the guys with 140. What I didn't know was that where I am puts me in the 98th percentile or as is popular to say 'the 2%'. I knew that my current income puts me in 'the 5%' for that demographic and I know that I live in a neighborhood that's about 1.3% African American. But in none of these ways do I feel so rare. I actually take it all kind of personally and reckon that I never knew how hard it would be to find friends just like me. Nevertheless, through all that, I feel that this sense of apartness has given me the distance and freedom to make sense of more than a few things, which I have done dutifully as a writer. I am a writer and I always have been. I write for machines and I write for people. I write through machines to people. And I have a resume which tells people that I can write for machines.

This brings me to the central intellectual subject of my life, which concerns the way that people come to know what they know and how they make decisions based upon what they know. Moreover how people make decisions given incomplete information, which is everything computers now produce (through writers who write for machines and/or people). And it is this that brings me into touch with the subject of education and history and what people can be presumed to learn, know and practice. It's all very woolly, I suppose, but I am a member of that woolly class. I believe that the fate of such a woolly class is embedded with the fate of humans and having come from relatively humble origins to this statistically rare and advanced position in American society is something worth noting, at least by anyone who'd bother to have me speak.

In my time traveling reveries I describe the wonders of the cutting edge of information technology, of my library and diet, of my travels and family, of my avocations and remaining hopes, of how I've dealt with the changes in society and the world. But that's very expansive and I don't want to write about all that here now. What I think fits is the particularly odd combination of things I do now as somebody who works at home in this overlap of relatively exclusive communities and what I think it means.

March 02, 2014

I went to a store. I can’t remember the name of the store or what I was buying there, but what I remembered was that there was music. There shouldn’t have been music in this store, there should have been Muzak. But today’s Muzak is all the same kind of confused soft rock & roll. Stuff like Goyte.

Technology allows Stuff Like Goyte, something catchy, simple, overexposed and annoying to be called entertainment because of what? A lack of discrimination. When you allow technology to ‘empower’ the ordinary Joe, then you have to understand that the ordinary Joe will exploit the opportunity at every turn. That’s how we know technology has value, because people use it to their advantage. And because they do it will be all in your face until you force it away or turn away yourself. If you want to immerse yourself in the creativity of the common man, this is your era. You have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Vines and dozens of other social media services. You will have a diverse experience. You will see everybody's point of view, and you'll never have to decide. You'll never have to sacrifice. You'll never have to discriminate. Social media presents perfect empathy for everyone. All you do is open your ears and eyes and every possible point of view is represented. It is a cornucopia of the common.

If you want quality, then work is required. More work than ever before.

It's hard to imagine that Beethoven's deafness was a horrible defect. He could certainly hear the music in his head with no distractions whatsoever. The distractions of common knowledge and conventional wisdom are pervasive today. Even colleges are pervasive. You can get a lot of intelligent opinion through computer mediated communications. But once you step above the common, it becomes awfully difficult to determine if what you are finding is actual. Once again, there is technology which aids and abets the intelligent, chatting class. If you choose to find out the series of events surrounding the burning of the Amerian Embassy in Libya and the murders of its officers, you will hear every theory possible. What actually happened would be a state secret, but you'll have all the smart theories, plus there will be some counterintelligence planted in that swirl of narrative as well.

We are entering a post-industrial twilight in which the ability to see clearly, while everyone's goal, becomes increasingly difficult as we peer through kaliedescopes of computed media. But this shouldn't come as a surprise. When everyone has a cell phone, making long distance calls is no longer an elite activity. When everyone gets to learn to read and write at public school for free, it's harder to write the Great American Novel. When everybody tries to run like Jesse Owens, it's harder to actually win gold at the Olympic Games. Technology has raised the bar for everyone. Citius. Altius. Fortius.

Our freedoms are all relative. What we can do is limited by the context in which we do it.

When I was younger, there was an expression of contempt in the phrase 'cotton-picking' as in "get your cotton-picking hands off me". It's something you don't hear much these days. A machine picks cotton and so that which was menial labor at great cost to the suppleness of the human hand, is now obviated. Nobody has cotton-picking hands any longer. Those people are out of work. So they had to do something more sophisticated that a machine can't do. We didn't think a computer could beat a grand master in chess, but we were wrong, and today, technology can't come close to performing ballet. What elevates us as humans becomes more and more important as technology replaces human work, but also as it empowers the least of us. We have to discriminate more about what is worth knowing when anybody with a Google device can ask questions and get reasonable answers in seconds. We have to discriminate more about what is worth doing when labor can be mechanized and automated. These are the new lines of class.

In 1964 if you had a car with 200 horsepower and a two-way radio smaller than a shoe, you could have been James Bond. Today if you have that, you're more like Maxwell Smart. There is nothing quite so marking of class these days as the man who walks around in public with a bluetooth earpiece affixed. Ten years ago it was awesome, now it's only awesome in Bulgaria. I have been on the cutting edge of information technology for my entire career; it is my career. I am acutely aware of how to discriminate when it comes to accepting the answers given to any question by a computer. Decision support is my job. And I know when money is aptly spent to support decisions by making the best use of compute power and when it is a waste of time and expense. I know when a computer aided decision augments human intelligence and when it replaces it. I can tell the difference between collaboration with compute resources and slavish dependence. Sometimes the cotton-picker goes free to study ballet, sometimes he gets demoted in pay to someone who merely tends to the machine that replaced him. Sometimes the common man uses his iPad to make the music in his head, sometimes he becomes a prisoner of the iTunes store and can only use the technology to feed a consuming habit.

Here at Cobb, I have made use of the terms gearhead, hacker and maker. This is the hierarchy in the post-industrial world. Because more of what our contemporary economies produce can be accomplished by smaller groups of people aided by compute power, the goods and services of our economies can be appreciated, modified and created more by individuals. No small group of men could build a railroad, but a small group of programmers could build a Facebook. But even the gearhead is advanced beyond the mere consumer or someone outside of the market altogether. Those who consume or aim to consume cannot afford to discriminate, figuratively or literally. They are as captive as ever before and cannot escape the attractions of Stuff Like Goyte. They are in the mass market, a growing global middle class in the billions. We have uplifted many more than ever before in human history. This *is* a global proletariate being born. But they will be united only by their discriminations because the very diversity of their undisciplined consumption will leave them behind. Why learn English, the language of computer programming and air traffic control, if Wikipedia comes automatically translated into your native idiom? Why learn Math if Siri will add numbers for you? Why learn Piano when Goyte is played wherever you walk? What is the point of being an extraordinarily talented human when you can be an ordinary Joe with extraordinary gifts provided to you by technology? Why pick cotton?

I keep in mind, ever since 9/11/2001, that all systems fail, that is all except pain receptors in the human body. All technology, all systems are designed to operate within certain environmental tolerances for a specified period of time. Stress those tolerances and snap, crackle, pop: system down. Makers are stressing those tolerances every day because they want what they build to exceed one or more of them. Hackers are stressing them to find the limits and gearheads make it their business to know the factors. Consumers and those wishing to consume are just trying to get a ride in the boat, trusting souls. For a maker and hacker and gearhead, (I am all three depending on the target), I want to experience the balance. I create for my consumers to the level of their expertise to enable them to do what I do with my 20 year headstart. That's a product; that's the enablement, the empowerment, the new economy. I could make them slavishly dependent but I choose not to. I want the product to educate as well. I want its guts to be transparent, so that when it fails, all can see how to fix it. This is a principle of integrity that can easily be ignored. It is disrespectful at best, and coercively entrapping and enslaving at bottom. It is the Muzak that cannot be switched off. It is ultimately the company town, the slave plantation whose master rejects the liberating cotton gin. And yet in human skill and nurtured talent is the ability to remain free of such all encompassing systems. When they fail, it is what humans must fall back on anyway. So we should always be mindful of what skills and talents and abilities we give up for the convenience and empowerment of technology.

Closing, I present once again, the irony inherent in our drive to empower through machines. I think it is driven primarily from our fundamental unwillingness to discriminate against people. We are able to empower through devices because of a basic failure to empower through human character. We punt responsibility to machines because we are unwilling to give the appropriate training and responsibility to human labor. In some cases, for picking cotton, that is the proper way to go. In many more cases than we care to examine in these days of social media, we are forgoing human judgment for the sake of empowerment of the indiscriminate masses. We create mass media with mass entertainment and generate Stuff Like Goyte. We pollute investigations with counterintelligence and cults of personality in order to sheild failures of judgment of the elites. We build obfuscating products and interminable co-dependent service contracts. We make things that function against standards.

I think the solution to this problem is found in the drive to embue ourselves with organic skills, to face life off the grid and make ourselves antifragile to the failures of systems. I think socially we should aim for Victorian relationships - to understand with clarity the necessities of life and to judge and discriminate people based upon their ability and willingness to provide them for themselves in all ways. I think we will find that as we reach for the gold medal achievements in life, we will find ourself more dependent on securing products and services from people who live at the silver level. That in order to avoid the catastrophe of humans dependent on systems whose failure is opaque to them in scope and time, that humans must depend on other humans whose capabilities are quite simply transparent to humans. Where only gearheads, hackers and makers can identify the stresses on systems, all of us know what tears mean.

I should like to go to a store where a woman plays a piano. Wouldn't you?